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An ad campaign doesn’t always go viral, but when it does…

It’s very rare that an ad campaign truly goes viral. But when it does it becomes part of our language, its slogan is repeated by people way beyond the commercials, and the bounce for the brand can be huge.

To give some inspiration for your next effort, here are a few noteworthy examples from the United States.

Where’s the beef?

The phrase was so popular that Wendy’s even sold merchandise such as t-shirts, bumper stickers, and frisbees with the phrase (you know your ads are successful when people are paying you for them!).

Wendy’s revenue increased 31%, and the phrase was so well known that presidential candidate Walter Mondale even used it to mock the substance of the proposals of opponent Gary Hart.

When you’re #2, you try harder

In America, being #1 is usually valued. But in 1962, rental car company Avis turned being a perennial runner-up into an asset with it’s “We try harder” slogan.

Sales shot up, Avis went from losses to profits and substantially closed its market-share gap with Hertz.

Does she… Or doesn’t she?

Finally, there’s Clairol’s famous “Does she… or doesn’t she?” campaign. The phrase quickly entered the mainstream after the campaign launched in 1956 and made hair coloring acceptable for women; within a decade the proportion of women dying their hair rose from 7% to almost 50%.

But these six are a mad man’s dream – hitting the cultural zeitgeist so squarely that the slogan or tagline goes viral and is amplified many times over, and seeing a huge increase in product sales (and agency revenues) as a result.

It seems that since the introduction of Instagram’s 15 second video capability, brands and regular users alike have begun to ignore Vine in favour of a social media platform they were already signed up to anyway.

I round-up the best branded Vines on a monthly basis (here are the best branded Vines of February) and I personally feel that there’s still massive potential for the only one-year old Vine when it comes to improving brand perception and connection.

So what separates Vine from Instagram video apart from the obvious technical differences? Perhaps by looking at these examples of Instagram videos from brands we’ll be able to understand how each platform can exist side-by-side whilst remaining different enough to be worthy of separate time and investment.